Friday, March 27, 2009

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings

Who says romance is dead? I found this on the floor of the post office today, obviously torn from the three-ring binder of a budding Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

Love hurts and brings tears to my eyes.Love brings undesired feelings to my heart that I despise.Love is stupid and pointless and a waste of time.Love makes me feel as if I spent all day rolling around in the dirt and grime.Love sucks fucking ass.I hate it, love is retarded.I hate every bit, love just makes me want to dieBut instead I lay on my bed and cryBecause I'm in love.

Ah yes, in the spring a young woman’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of ... rolling around in the dirt and grime, sucking retarded ass.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

"Stop Hitler Now"

Heather Mallick is a bewilderingly bad writer.

Bewilderingly.

There's just no gentler way of putting it, I'm afraid. (Indeed, that I don't go so far as to say that the reason she is such a bad writer is that she is also bewilderingly unintelligent, strikes me as being very gentle indeed.) Take her most recent column. On the surface it would appear to be a paean to political satire. But--quintessence of irony itself--a more irony deficient essay on the subject I defy you to find. The thing is incredible.

I mean, she actually says this: "These days, I turn to comedians for information, advice and moral guidance, in fact, for an entire stance on life." And which comedians you may ask? Take a wild stab in the dark, Lancelot. One ends with --ewart, the other with --olbert.

Yes, she admits this. A "left-of-center" political commentator at the CBC actually admits this. And not, notice, just that she likes these entertainers, that she finds them funny. They are, rather, her source for moral guidance, an entire stance on life! For inforfuckingmation!

Help me out here: I'm laughing, I'm crying, my ears are bleeding. Is Rush Limbaugh making a little satire of his own under a pseudonym?

But it gets even better.

Under the section subheaded "Stop Hitler now" (yes, those are the words, swear to God--the next section? "Comedians rule") the following appears:

[Will Ferrell's Bush-satire] You're Welcome, America is surreal. It resembles the 1930s Berlin cabarets that had the Nazis so riled up, satire that, as Tom Lehrer (the revered songwriter-satirist of the early sixties) put it, "did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War."

I'm not saying that satire and pure lowdown comedy can change world events. But they change minds in some important subterranean way. Perhaps.

Remember Lenny Bruce saying, "If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses."

So times do change and only the most morally bankrupt of the American states execute people now.

Secondly, I should hope that you weren't saying that "satire and pure lowdown comedy can change world events." To do so would be to miss precisely the irony--the glaring, balls-out irony--of the line you just misattributed to Tom Lehrer. To do so, in effect, would be to deal your faves Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Will Ferrell (the man you describe so nonsensically as a "guttural" genius) a truly devastating, indeed a fatal, blow. To do so, I say, would be to prove--in a kind of excruciating literary slow-motion--exactly how impervious you are to satire at the very moment you declare it to be the sine qua non of, not just political commentary, but of human achievement.

Thirdly, what the HELL do those last two paragraphs mean?! Honestly! Do they mean anything? Of themselves even, let alone as they relate to everything else here?

Sunday, March 22, 2009

The Horror

Kevin Grace sends the following under the subject line "Modern Britain in one paragraph":

Jade Koresha Lorraine Goody was born in Bermondsey on June 5 1981. Her father, of mixed race parentage, was a heroin addict and small-time pimp turned career criminal who spent most of his life behind bars, eventually dying of an overdose in the lavatory of the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Bournemouth. Her paternal grandmother, who once ran a brothel, had a crack habit. Her mother, Jackiey, the daughter of a market trader, was described in her daughter's autobiography as a petty thief and "clipper" – a woman who pretends to be a prostitute but runs off with the money instead. Jackiey threw Jade's father out of the house when Jade was 18 months old, after discovering that he had hidden guns under her cot. To add to the confusion, Jackiey herself later came out as a lesbian.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Take that, Pope Virgin!

"My reaction is that this represents a major step backwards in terms of global health education, is entirely counter-productive, and is likely to lead to increases in HIV infection in Africa and elsewhere," said Prof Quentin Sattentau, Professor of Immunology at Britain's Oxford University.

Two things about this.

The first: How can it be "a major step backwards in terms of global health" if discouraging the use of condoms has always, expressly and unambiguously, been the Vatican's position?

The second: Gosh this "[it] is likely to lead to increases in HIV infection" argument sounds familiar. Oh yeah! It's exactly Benedict's line of reasoning except with the variables reversed. I.E. while the Catholic Church believes that the reason there is so much AIDS in Africa is because nobody is listening to them, the pro jimmy-hat crowd believes that it is because everybody is listening to them. That is, apparently Africans are unplugging their ears at precisely the moment the Pope tells them not to use condoms, then swiftly replugging them against all that other business about "personal sacrifices", "correct behaviour regarding one's body", abstinence, mutual respect, monogamy, etc.

Well, obviously, that makes complete sense--whereas the other position is raving, irrational hogwash.

Oh, those ridiculous Catholics! Next thing they'll be trying to tell us that it is harder to persuade a man to put on a condom before he rapes someone than it is to convince him of some vague ideological claptrap that rape is wrong. Lunatics.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Reprise: The Acceptable Usage

For all of you who, like me, are growing increasingly alarmed at the bipartisan decay of political discourse in this country (oh, how I long for the days when it was only the Left accusing the Right of racism) I give you once again:

A pair of idiots debating how many minorities can dance upon the point of a needle without jostling one another. (Click the image, press play)

"The levelling demands of a generous democratic inspiration have been changed from aspirations and ideals into appetites and unconscious assumptions."

- José Ortega Y Gasset

"Strange to think of you, strange now to hear your voices through the ether coming from a world so long since barred to us! I miss you, miss you even though you were opponents of mine and politically on the other side - oh, believe me, finally it is the lack of all opposition and any dissension whatsoever, and the deadly monotony that results that makes life here so unbearable."

- Friedrich Percyval Reck- Malleczewen

"It is only the sentimentalist who imagines that the profundity of a person's response to tragedy is proportional to the length, volume or shrillness of his lamentation."

- Theodore Dalrymple

"Real freedom, concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy."

- Roger Scruton

"A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper, and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides ... the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires."

- Edmund Burke

"The current muddle between subjectivism about morals and dogmatism about rights, for example, merely conceals the semantic changes by which the moral is being transposed into the manipulable, leading to a gullible acquiescence in the projects of governments."

- Kenneth Minogue

"In Toronto, it appears, one may leer desirously at underdressed girls, or gape at them with the costive expression of one who considers Nudity and Art to be synonymous terms, but one must not laugh."

- Samuel Marchbanks

"Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity."